AMBASSADOR (RET.) YORAM ETTINGER: National security and foreign policy become self-destructive when replacing inconvenient and well-documented reality with convenient and speculative alternate reality. Eventually, hard facts assert themselves at severe cost to the alternate reality-driven policy makers.
The Gaza arena is only one tentacle of the venomous Iranian Octopus, which has evolved – since toppling the Shah in 1979, and in cooperation with China, Russia and North Korea – into a lead epicenter of regional and global anti-US terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and the proliferation of advanced military systems. The Iranian octopus has spread its tentacles from the Persian Gulf and the Middle East – aiming to topple all pro-US Arab regimes – through Africa into Latin America, including the US-Mexico border and (a growing network of sleeper cells) on US soil.
The Ayatollah regime persists in its military, economic and diplomatic collaboration with drug cartels (trafficking drugs into the US), terror organizations and anti-US governments in Latin America, which it considers as the soft underbelly of the US.
The Ayatollah regime considers the end of June 2025 war as an end of a single battle in a prolonged war; a temporary ceasefire, not an end of the war against the “Great American Satan” and its Middle East vanguard, Israel – “the Little Satan.”